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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
Right-Level Selling
We’ve always been taught to “call high.” We are supposed to reach “The Decision-maker,” perhaps leveraging our influencers. But complex B2B buying has changed profoundly, “The Decision-maker” has become a buying/decision-making group. The number of people, directly and indirectly, involved in the buying process has grown. Often, corralling them, and helping them navigate their buying process makes herding cats seem trivial. But we still have some mistaken notions about “calling high.” Here are some thoughts: What is the vested interest of the people involved in the buying process? Sometimes, while we think what we sell is important, it may not […]
Banish These Words, “For Now…”
Before continuing, I have to give credit to this phrase and important concept to Brent Adamson. Brent and I were having one of our frequent conversations about the future of buying/selling. We were discussing the pandemic and it’s impact on buyers and sellers. We’ve seen our worlds turned upside down. We and our customers are re-inventing our business. We, mutually, are discovering new ways of buying and new ways to engage our customers. As I speak with many business people, they reflect, then say, “It’s fascinating, this has caused us to rethink what we are doing. And we are discovering […]
Sales Role Specialization
A couple of people I deeply respect have written outstanding pieces arguing that we have take sales role specialization too far. Amy Volas wrote, “Is Sales Over-segmented,” Bob Apollo wrote, “Has role specialisation in B2B selling gone too far?” (There Bob goes with his “English” spelling.) Both articles are outstanding. I thought I’d pile on, perhaps reinforcing their points. Much of their discussion has to do with the current mechanization of selling that’s become popular in the SDR/AE approach to selling. This assembly line process starts with a widget (let’s call them customers), being passed from person to person down […]
“But We Did It This Way In My Old Company!”
I was speaking with a Sales Executive. He was relatively new to the company, he’d been in the role for a few months. The organization had been performing reasonably well, but they wanted to expand and grow quickly. He had been recruited to lead that effort. As we spoke, he said, “Dave, I don’t understand. We’re doing well, but not as well as I had hoped. I don’t know why things aren’t working.” I asked what things he had done, and what he didn’t think was working. He replied, “In my past company, we did a number of things that […]
We Don’t Create Value By Discounting It!
I was doing a deal review. We were in the final stages of closing a big deal. The team had worked really hard. It’s the end of the month/quarter/year. They not only wanted the deal, but they needed the deal. Then it happened. The customer says, “We are almost there, but we’ve hit a roadblock…….” I won’t go into the details, but the customer presented a fascinating discussion. Neatly hidden was, “The way we solve this is we need an adjustment to payment terms, can you give us the first X months free?” Hidden in this elegant argument was a […]
Why Does Your “Bot” Want To Talk To Me?
We are in a period where automation has run amuck. “Bots” and Artificial Intelligence (with the emphasis on Artificial) are running our outreach campaigns. Whether through email, phone, social platforms, in our efforts to drive volume and velocity, we have surrendered everything to our automation tools. Often, I get an outreach, I respond—which is fantastic for the sender. I ask, “What is it that you want to talk about, why do you think it is relevant to me?” “What do you know about our business that causes you to think we should talk?” Most of the time, I get no […]